“Your friend asked me to help her, and her alone,” he said. “She didn’t tell me you’d be here.”
I believed him. Only because I knew how much Yunie delighted in trolling me at every possible opportunity.
I noticed he was empty-handed. “You didn’t bring any food? This is an all-day thing.”
“I didn’t think to. I’ll be fine.”
Yeah, right. He could play tough all he wanted, but I saw him give a long look at the fruit I’d packed.
“Here,” I said, handing it over. “Just take it.”
“Thanks!” He held up the gift for a brief moment with both hands like a monk accepting alms. “Peaches are my favorite food in the universe. But this one looks different?”
He took a nibble and his eyes grew as big as plates.
“It’s a peach hybrid,” I said. “Crossed with a plum or apricot or something. You like it?”
“It’s amazing!” he mumbled through massive bites, trying to keep the juice from dribbling far and wide.
I watched him eat, completely absorbed in his treat. It was cute. If he had a tail, it would’ve been wagging like a puppy’s.
I decided that small talk was acceptable. “You handled Mike and his gang pretty well,” I said. “Where did you learn wushu?”
“Didn’t,” said Quentin. “Never took a single lesson in fighting.”
“Oh? What about babysitting? You’re a natural at that, too?”
“I’ve got a lot of little cousins and nieces and nephews back home that I used to take care of. I like kids. I was happy to volunteer for this.”
He shifted the peach stone into his cheek like a gumball and stared accusingly at me. “From what I could gather from your friend, however, the two of you are only doing this to gain access to a magical kingdom called Harvard.”
“Pfft. Yale would also suffice.”
He didn’t appreciate the joke. In fact, he grew downright serious.
“It seems to me that you are jumping through many hoops to please some petty bureaucratic gatekeepers,” he said.
I laughed. I’d never heard the admissions process described like that before.
“That’s how the system works,” I said. “You think I care about my grades just because? You think I enjoy working on my essays for their own sake?”
His naïveté was strange. A transfer student from the mainland shouldn’t have been this clueless. Most of them were only here in the first place to improve their shot at a top-tier school.
“I’m doing this because I don’t want to be poor,” I said. “I don’t want to stay in this town. I want to move forward in life, and that means college. The more prestigious the better.”
I wadded up my paper bag and chucked it into the recycling bin. “If you’re a taizidang like my mother thinks you are, then you wouldn’t understand. You probably had everything handed to you.”
He looked disappointed in my response.
“I hope you have better luck with the system than I did,” he said.
Quentin had a troubled, faraway look on his face, like he was remembering his own long-ago ordeal in academia. He must have gone to one of
those cram-factories where they spanked you with abacuses. Maybe that was how his English seemed to be improving at an exponential rate.
I sighed. “You want half of my sandwich? It’s ham and Swiss.”
“Thanks,” he said. “But I’m a vegetarian.”